Hey fellow Wazers -

2010 has been a wild ride at Waze.  Thanks to our amazing area managers, mappers and global users, we have grown to over 2.2 Million drivers!  We have expanded our service to over 100 countries, and rolled out support for the 5 major smart phone OS’es, which is bringing the power of the social web to the driving experience in a whole new way.

We believe strongly that, since traffic is a social phenomenon, the solution must be social as well.  We have built our service around crowdsourcing real time driving data and have seen the value of this data grow – for our users and every day commuters, as well as commercial data companies and advertisers.

So it is with great pride that we announce we have closed $25m of funding, in a round led by our existing investors, Blue Run Ventures, Magma and Vertex, together with new strategic investors, including Qualcomm Ventures.   We would like to thank our existing investors for their support and welcome our new investors, as we look forward to their help in making our service even better.

With this fresh funding we are hiring extensively and planning to grow our amazing team on all fronts. First, we will expand our US HQ in Silicon Valley in terms of people and relocate to a larger office – we have outgrown our space here a bit We are also looking for talented people to help scale our service and build new functionality. Mostly, we need to continue to build our platform for real-time location data, where we are competing with the largest tech companies in the world, and can now build the corresponding organization!

So what’s in store for 2011?  First of all – we have big plans to improve and grow our service.  Lots of great features, functionality and infrastructure upgrades (prepare for a blazing fast Cartouch…).  Second – this will be the year of opening up our platform – data, API’s, access (more to come soon)…  Third – We plan to take crowdsourcing further than it has ever gone before.  We want media companies to engage users as citizen journalists, and NBC2 is just the first step toward this. We want to enable local governments to encourage users to report about hazards on the road to help keep our roads safe.  We want major brands to provide wazer’s with incentives to visit their establishment, helping you find deals on the road…  We have lots of big plans for 2011, and now have the funding to achieve them.

So – things are just taking off.  The future is social–come join us for the ride!

Noam (@noamb11) and the Waze Team (@waze)

We’re happy to announce our ‘official’ launch in Italy today, though the community there has been growing strong and steady for quite a while under the tutelage of some very active users. Similar to our launch in France and Germany a few weeks ago, this launch will also feature a developed road grid, which we’ll merge with data that local users have already contributed on their own.

In order to turn the grid into a fully functioning map, Italian wazers will just need to validate road directions by driving on the roads themselves, and add road names via waze’s online map editor. When the whole community gets involved, as we expect many of the Italians to do – like they’ve been doing for a while now, the entire process is incredibly quick,  and within just a couple of weeks, the Italian maps will be fully navigable and super accurate.

We thank all you Italians for your hard work up to this point, and we look forward to seeing how your community develops now that the base maps will make waze even more valuable. Keep us up to date and let us know if there’s anything you need…happy wazing!

Though fledgling driving communities have already developed in both Germany and France, today, we’re happy to announce our official launch in these countries. Bonjour and Guten tag, friends!

German and French wazers can now benefit from:

• a brand new road grid
• UI and voice prompts in their own languages
• a road full of ‘goodies’ to help new users rack up points as they help improve the navigability of the map in their areas
• AND…treasure chests that may contain Amazon giftcards!

Road grids that will quickly become navigable maps

Up until recently, users in these areas needed to record roads entirely from scratch, however, we’ve received access to a comprehensive set of German and French road grids, which we’ll merge with data that local users have already contributed on their own, and – poof! – these communities will be off to a fantastic start. All that’s missing in order to turn the grid into a fully functioning map is for local wazers to validate road directions by driving on the roads themselves, and to add road names via waze’s online map editor.

Road goodies and virtual treasure chests for extra points and prizes!

Starting today, French and German users will find that most roads will be marked with plenty of ‘road munching’ dots – GPS points that, when driven over, set the road’s direction, helping to increase map quality and navigability, while providing them with tons of extra points. The process of validation is incredibly quick – within just a couple of weeks, these maps will be fully navigable and highly accurate. We’ll also be adding candy and cupcake ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth 3 and 5 bonus points, respectively – to the map in areas where the system needs validation.

…And don’t forget the best part: waze’ll be distributing VIRTUAL TREASURE CHESTS (!) on the roads that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with an Amazon gift card – so French and German wazers, get out there and find ‘em!

What’s to come?

Stay tuned to the waze blog for the official launch of driving communities in other areas…we’re working on a bunch of stuff that you’re gonna want to know about…

Pretty kewl. Laptop magazine selected us as one of their best mobile start ups of 2010. Not a bad way to start off the day!